The Science of Why

Decoding Human Motivation and Transforming Marketing Strategy

D. Forbes

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137502049
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

In this groundbreaking book, author David Forbes explains human motivation and provides ways that marketers can effectively reach the consumer. The book uses decades of psychology research and the author's own tool, the Forbes Matrix that identifies, organizes, and explains the nine core motivations.

CHAPTER 1

Marketing to Motivation

The drive to persuade and to sell is part of what makes us human. We are, if nothing else, a social and a political species. From early childhood, we seek to persuade and to influence the situations and people around us. If you’ve ever seen a child working though sixteen reasons why it’s not yet time to go home from the playground, you know exactly what I mean. Ever since we’ve had something to sell, trade, or barter, we’ve been trying to persuade someone else to buy it.

From Lascaux to Twitter

We have taken a long strange trip from the caves at Lascaux to the welter of communications in the bold new world around us today. The clutter we navigate every second far exceeds anything we could ever have imagined even a generation ago. In fact, it’s probably not an exaggeration to characterize the great, sweeping momentum of that change—in media, in communication, in popular culture—as transformational.

A big part of that change manifests in the way we consume media and messages today. When I was a kid, in the late fifties, there were only three channels available on TV. Everyone watched the same three channels. We all absorbed the same messages, available for the same amount of time, night after night. At 11 p.m., the three channels signed off. It was time for the country to go to bed. And so we did.

We consumed most of our other media in collectively standardized fashion as well. Our favorite musical artists regularly released standard-length albums, complete with catchy liner notes and mesmerizing cover art. We listened to them—in real time—with our friends, from beginning to end, day in and day out, until their grooves literally wore away. Then we taped quarters to the stylus of our record players and kept right on listening.

Like everyone around us, we knew those lyrics by heart and used the most personally meaningful of them to create a soundtrack for our lives. As we faithfully listened to that music and watched those shows, we progressed through a succession of predictable life stages together. We didn’t all like the same things, of course, but we shared a basic understanding of the options available to us. We saw those options as paths to reject or embrace as we made our way in the world. They embodied the zeitgeist of the era, the social bonds that held my generational cohort together.

The world began to change for my generation when Ted Turner created a fourth option to compete with our beloved three networks. CNN and the 24-hour news cycle stormed the scene in 1980, and the world would never be the same again. Suddenly we could consume media around the clock—and suddenly it was less of a “given” that we’d all watch or hear the same things.

Of course, Turner’s revolutionary concept and the offerings of subscription television quickly evolved further still, and now these too are becoming quaint and obsolete. Faced with this tsunami of stimuli, we fall back on the psychological mechanisms that have served us well since the time of the cave drawings. Our ancient brains are filters. They continuously pay attention to some things and shut out others. They tell us when to turn a glance into a gaze; they filter out the important signals from the cacophony of noise going on around us. They tell us when to start paying attention, and they tell us when to stop.

Foremost among these filters are the emotional filters. With every stimulus that comes in as a candidate for our attention, our emotional filters almost instantaneously ask these questions: “How do I feel about this?” “Will this be useful to me?” “Should I run away from this, or should I attack it?” Our emotional brain asks these questions over and over as we move through our day—and it does so faster than the speed of light and almost always below the threshold of our consciousness. This emotional processing lets us take action in situations that matter to us, helps us take advantage of situations that can benefit us, and keeps us safe in city crosswalks just as it once kept us safe from predators on the savanna.

Our brains still start the emotional processing of every new stimulus with the amygdala and its “fight or flight or freeze” judgment. But this is just the beginning of the complex emotional filtering that occurs with every new thing we encounter. Our emotional brain evaluates the emotional significance of what our senses bring to our attention. At this point, our core motivations—the ones we’ll be exploring in this book—come into full play. The question about “Will this be useful; can this help me out?” is answered foremost by reference to the core motivational forces that drive us all. These questions become “Could this represent a chance to fulfill any of my aspirational yearnings?” or “Might it give me a chance to overcome some of the frustrations that nag me as I move through my life?”

If a particular stimulus passes the threshold of emotional relevance, then we move on to the intellectual evaluations that will help us take best advantage of the opportunity—and get the most emotionally fulfilling outcome: “Should I react to this now or later?” “Will this go well with what I’m doing at the moment, or will taking advantage of it require a change of plan?” All these and many more intellectual questions need answers before we fully formulate how we will respond to a new situation that our senses present to us.

As we perform these evaluations, in thousandths of a second, we determine whether what we perceive represents something we feel good—or bad—about and whether it gives us an opportunity to change our lives for the better. And so it is that the very first questions we will ask are linked to the aspirations and frustrations we carry along with us as we move through life. These psychological motivations not only drive what we do but literally form a set of lenses through which we perceive the world around us.

Marketers widely complain about the clutter of messages in the marketplace today, but that’s really just the half of it. The clutter of marketing messages is only a subset of the broader clutter of stimuli that surround us in the world in which we now live. That’s why marketing messages—if they are to stand any chance of gaining access to our brains—must first pass through our emotional filters by communicating immediately and on a visceral level. They must be redolent with the promise of positive emotional experience. And they must arouse one of our core emotional motivations. Otherwise the print ad will lose out to the article on the facing page or to the child in the room asking about breakfast. The television advertisement will lose out to the vase of flowers that needs watering or to the rumbling of our stomachs that signals it’s snack time. The billboard advertisement may lose out to the attractive person passing in front of us or to the cute kid in the stroller just ahead. Likewise, the pop-up ad may lose out to the video link. And so it goes with every stimulus we encounter. The process of making these almost continuous emotional evaluations is largely instinctive – a function that is as old as or older than our first recorded steps toward motivation and persuasion in those “advertorials” on the ancient cave walls.

A Brief History of the Marketplace

Starting with trading beads like those discovered in the earliest human cave dwellings, the market has both created and answered consumers’ needs for products and services. Since those first primitive exchanges, “manufacturers” have scrambled to improve their products and to invent new ones at a dizzying pace, always chasing the signals and signs of what people want. Of course, unlocking the secrets behind what consumers really want is the province of motivational theory and emotional research—a journey we’re just beginning.

We can trace the early beginnings of marketing as we now practice it in the business world back to the beginning of the agricultural revolution. In the eons before we learned sedentary agriculture and animal husbandry, humans were nomadic, living hand to mouth and always engaged in the pursuit of food, safety, shelter, and the primal directive to reproduce.

In those early days, staying alive took up all of our time and all of our energy—calorically, physically, mentally, emotionally, and even culturally. In fact, before we invented cooking food over a fire, we literally spent more than half of our day just chewing our food.

We didn’t have the luxury of downtime to drive production, consumption, and ownership, and we didn’t yet have permanent homes to fill with the things we cherished. Only after our basic physiological needs were met did we begin to have the freedom to consider less urgent concerns. Only then did we become able to dream of and build a better life.

Through a series of pivotal developments, the agricultural revolution took hold, allowing members of those nomadic groups to put down literal and metaphorical roots. Over the course of many generations—again, in terms of evolution, just the blink of an eye—we became experts in planting and harvesting food and inventing and using tools. Cereals and grains were among our first domesticated crops. Gourds were reimagined as bowls. We kept our own animals as helpers and tamed them for use as food (like cattle and pigs and other livestock), as providers of commodities like wool (provided by sheep and llamas), transportation (horses, mules, camels, and elephants), protection (dogs), and eventually as companions. We made pottery and learned food preservation techniques. At last, we became comfortable enough to feed our minds as well as our bellies. And all of this steadily increased our capacity to look beyond our physical selves and our immediate needs to imagine and yearn for a veritable host of ways we could improve our lives and make ourselves happier.

As we built permanent homes, they became spaces we could improve over time, places our children could live and play in, and places to protect us, to house our possessions, and to preserve our legacies. We filled them not only with items of necessity, to be sure, but also with things that meant something to us on emotional and spiritual levels. As the significance of these items grew, we began to treasure them and to struggle to preserve them.

Not too far into this process, the day came when we found ourselves with significant excess time and excess provisions. This left us with the building blocks of the first “products” we could now trade with our neighbors, who were also newly able to produce more than they needed to survive. As time passed we devised methods to produce more and better products—sturdier shoes, clothes that fit, and felt better, and soap that really got things clean. Meanwhile, our neighbors were also hard at work and devised systems and innovations that let them produce their products at a higher quality as well. And in this freest of free markets there were naturally redundancies in what everyone was making, and that’s what gave rise to competition.

This also led to the beginning of marketing (“Hey, look,” said John, “my soap is better than the other guys’!”). As insights, inventions, and new products sprang up to populate the marketplace, new options only succeeded over competing ones if they delivered a better way (or the perception of a better way) to improve the lives of the people who bought them. That is, to prevail in the market, products and services had to possess a compelling ability either to bring consumers closer to their aspirations and hopes or to help them move farther from their frustrations and fears.

The idea of “branding” began to emerge, asspecialization, innovation, and word-of-mouth endorsements propelled generations of fortunate craftsmen to develop the reputation for making the best shoes (or clothes or soap) possible. (See sidebar) Whole neighborhoods and whole villages became expert in making a small number of products.

A Brand to Trust

The name recognition and reputation of early craftsmen marked the beginning of what we now know as branding. That term developed, as you might guess, from the practice of branding livestock, particularly cattle. First used some 4,000 years ago, brands were symbols burned onto the animal’s haunches that served two important purposes

The first and most obvious job of branding was to differentiate one “product” from another: this cow is mine, that cow is yours. But in a more subtle waythe brand symbol also came to indicate the skills and reputation of the “producer” as well. That cow is the property of an excellent businessman, the brand insisted. The person who wields this symbol has great worth, status, and value.

Gradually, as we learned to advertise and deliver a wide range of goods across a widening range of communities, the brand mark evolved into a kind of shorthand for marketers who wanted to spread awareness of their products among a growing number of consumers most of whom were still unable to read. That’s how the concept of the logo as a signal of provenance—a “brand mark”—as we know it now was born.

For many generations at the beginning of our marketplace culture, we did business with our neighbors and friends in our own general neighborhood of small villages where people were well acquainted with each other. Most of those exchanges occurred in homes or commons. We knew the quality of products because we intimately knew the producers and the users of them, and we had known their parents and clan for all our lives. In this society of consumers and producers, reputations were made and lost on the basis of how well our products performed; everyone knew firsthand or heard from trusted friends and neighbors that John’s (and John’s son’s) soaps, for example, really worked.

As increasingly efficient methods of manufacturing evolved, a growing surplus of goods outstripped the needs of people living within the boundaries of the known neighborhood area. Marketers needed ways to increase their reach. This gave rise to another game-changing shift.

Growing the marketplace beyond the local neighborhood of villages and engaging in trade with more distant and larger audiences ushered in a new era of sales-driven business practices as we looked for new ways to compete. To succeed we had to motivate new consumers to buy our products—customers that we’d never seen or met and who did not know us and our goods at all. To reach consumers at a distance beyond word-of-mouth reputation it became necessary to broadcast, and that’s how product advertising was born—and the business of consumer persuasion began.

The Evolution of Motivational Marketing

These early forays into the art of persuasion still focused on the reputation of the individual or the craftsmen. And presentation of the products from these master craftsmen focused on the functional benefits, and a reputation for quality and value was everything.

But with a steadily increasing barrage of products, manufacturers, and advertisers working for them, it quickly became apparent that many excellent brands of almost any product type were available. Faced with the inability to compete simply on quality and value, manufacturers needed a way to persuade their customers to buy their brand even without an obvious or provable advantage.

Meanwhile, inventors and entrepreneurs used their brainpower to create new products that had never existed before, and they needed to create a need in consumers’ minds where there previously had been none. In these new marketplace contexts, the idea of “higher-order benefits” and the activity of “brand positionin...